


Anything You Need, Anything at All

by tenderly_wicked



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Sherlock Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-19
Updated: 2014-02-19
Packaged: 2018-01-13 01:41:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1208146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenderly_wicked/pseuds/tenderly_wicked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by <a href="http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/21766.html?thread=129724678#t129724678">this prompt</a>. Molly was there for Sherlock during the fall, and she never refused him when he asked for help. But sometimes it’s not enough, waiting to be asked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anything You Need, Anything at All

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my beta primalmusic!

Sherlock never calls. Molly has got used to it by now. He’d rather text, or invade her lab without a warning, or simply show up on her doorstep, with a handkerchief pressed to his bleeding nose.

“I’m going to be sick,” he says instead of a conventional “Hello”.

“That’s because you shouldn’t have tilted your head back,” Molly explains to him afterwards. “When you swallow blood, it, um, upsets your stomach.”

Sherlock lets out a mirthless laugh, holding an ice pack across the bridge of his nose to close the blood vessels. “Didn’t want to ruin a new shirt.”

“But there’s a bloodstain on it anyway,” Molly points out. “On your back. How come it’s on your back?”

Sherlock scowls. “I fell. A gash must have opened.”

“A gash?”

Once the nosebleed has stopped, Molly makes Sherlock take off his shirt. He seems to be too dizzy and exhausted to argue. The fabric turns out to have stuck to the long, inflamed cut, but Sherlock makes no sound and sits still while Molly gingerly peels it off.

“You’d better see a proper doctor. I do post-mortems, you know, I’m not really fit for…” She can’t help her voice from trembling. If she had ever wanted to contemplate Sherlock half-naked, she’d never dreamt it would be like this.

“You’ll do,” Sherlock tells her offhandedly.

“Maybe you should call John,” she presses further. “Does he know you’ve come back?”

“Yes.” Sherlock doesn’t elaborate on it, but there’s something in his tone that makes Molly stop questioning him.

When she’s done with treating the wound, one of many, Sherlock looks even paler than before.

“Perhaps it’s all for the best,” he mutters, attempting at a smile. “You don’t normally fancy a man who throws up in your toilet and then tells you to patch him up.”

That sounds reasonable. The problem is, Molly has never been a very reasonable person. Or quite normal, come to think of it.

That’s probably why she insists that he should sleep in her bedroom. It’s not how she’d been imagining it, Sherlock spending a night in her bed. But well, with Sherlock things never go as expected.

Molly wakes up in the middle of the night, and not because the couch is utterly uncomfortable, though it definitely is. Sherlock’s groaning, loudly. Maybe he’s turned onto his back in his sleep and worried his wounds again. Molly doesn’t hesitate before throwing on a dressing gown over her nightie and rushing to see if she can be of help.

Sherlock is lying on his front, an arm stretched out across the crumpled sheets, and the other one trapped uncomfortably under his weight. A groan is trembling in his throat.

Molly touches his palm tentatively—oh god, even in the twilight she can see how badly his wrist is chafed, and suddenly Sherlock catches her hand, squeezes it.

“John?” he mumbles.

“It’s me,” she says lamely. “It’s just a dream.”

For a few moments, Sherlock holds her hand, obviously still half-dazed, but then he abruptly lets go and mutters, not looking up, “Go back to sleep.”

“I could stay,” Molly suggests. “I don’t mind.”

“I’m fine,” he snarls into the pillow. “Go.”

And Molly obeys, like she always does. Maybe she shouldn’t have, this time.

She’s seen a lot of injuries and violent deaths, it’s a part of her job after all; but she’s at a loss how to treat a torture survivor. What should she have said, how could she soothe him?

In the morning, Sherlock looks embarrassed. Molly’s a bit embarrassed too, but it’s all right. It’s her usual state.

“You can stop by any time you want. Just maybe call beforehand,” she offers as a compensation for her inability to help him otherwise. Tom probably won’t be pleased about another man turning up at his girlfriend’s flat “anytime he wants”, but she can’t forget Sherlock clutching at her hand, like it’s his only anchor to reality—a boy who went looking for adventure and got lost in a nightmare.

***

Sherlock would rather make a dramatic entrance than call. Molly opens her locker at Barts—and as the door swings open, the mirror on the inside reveals Sherlock standing behind her, a pale specter in a black coat. And that’s only to invite her to come to Baker Street tomorrow.

As it turns out, Sherlock wants her to solve crimes with him, like John did. A sort of “thank you”. Sherlock says, “You’re not being John—you’re being yourself.” But it doesn’t feel like it. Sherlock keeps talking to John between his quick-fire deductions, though John’s not there, and Molly feels a bit redundant.

But maybe she shouldn’t have turned him down when he’d asked, casually, “Fancy some chips?” Why did she have to tell him about her engagement, in detail, and point at her ring, like it meant she wasn’t going to mingle with an old friend anymore because of it? Not even have dinner with him?

“You can’t do this again, can you?” Sherlock had inquired softly, and she hadn’t contradicted him. He’d said, “I hope you’ll be very happy, Molly Hooper. You deserve it. After all, not all the men you fall for can turn out to be sociopaths”—basically, calling himself a sociopath too, and she hadn’t objected to it.

It’s snowing. Sherlock walks away from her, pulling his coat around him, and doesn’t look back. Molly stops to put her gloves on, hesitant and already regretful. Perhaps it hadn’t been entirely all about her. What if Sherlock had simply wanted someone around? It must be sad to be alone after what he’s been through, and it’s not like he’s got a lot of friends to turn to. Should she have called after him and said she had changed her mind?

Sherlock didn’t ask her for help, but she once had promised him that if there was anything he needed, anything at all, it was fine—should she have elaborated that he had to ask for it first?

Molly keeps berating herself until that evening, when Tom comes home.

When she gets to see Sherlock briefly, now and then, he doesn’t look well. Physically, he seems to be fine, fully recovered, but he’s sullen and resolute, like he’s determined to trudge through his life stoically, whatever it brings.

It brings him John’s wedding. Molly’s worried about him, and not only because he’ll have to make a speech in front of people.

It seems that she’d been right in her apprehensions. When John brings Sherlock, sulky and edgy, to take a private drug test, Molly gets so wound up, frightened for Sherlock beyond measure, that maybe she acts too harshly. Sherlock blinks and grimaces as she slaps him, and makes a caustic remark about her failed engagement.

“Stop it, just stop it,” Molly hisses, but she can understand Sherlock being bitter about her affair with Tom. Two of his friends simultaneously drifting away because they had found domestic bliss, quite happy without him now—that’s too much to endure for a man who had just returned home from exile, hoping that his life would be the same as it had been before.

As an afterthought, she regrets her words about him betraying the love of his friends.

Of course no one bothers to tell Molly when Sherlock ends up in a hospital, wounded, dying. She only learns about what’s happened a week or so later. Sherlock is still on painkillers, ghastly pale and listless. She dares to touch his hand stretched over a hospital blanket, and Sherlock lets her.

“Thanks for slapping me,” he murmurs. “Made me focus.” John had warned her that Sherlock was too drugged up to make sense.

***

When Sherlock calls her, it’s the second shock in a day. Molly would have eagerly skipped the first—seeing Jim Moriarty’s face flickering on her TV screen.

“Are you all right?” Sherlock demands to know, without formal greetings, as always.

“Yeah, I think so, yeah.”

He frightens her, saying, “Molly, I’m so sorry.” Sherlock rarely says that, and not in such a tone, like it’s a plea. He sounds deflated and desperate, and whatever he’s babbling next, about his brother having promised to deal with security matters and Molly being safer staying at her place until it’s all sorted out, nothing is going to keep her from rushing to Baker Street, as fast as she can. Molly’s sure she heard John’s voice in the background. At least Sherlock is not alone, but she needs to be beside him too. Sherlock hasn’t asked for help, and it’s not that Molly’s able to provide any, but he’s clearly shaken. She can’t stay away. It’s not his fault, whatever is happening. Molly wants to make sure Sherlock understands that, because judging from his incoherent apologies, he seems to be convinced otherwise.

Molly finds John pacing across the living room, Mary sitting in Sherlock’s favourite chair, and Sherlock on the sofa, brooding.

John is agitated. He flails a hand at Sherlock. “Maybe _you_ can make him talk, Molly. He says he could have missed something in Serbia—imagine that!—some part of Moriarty’s web—but he doesn’t deign to elucidate. How very helpful, Sherlock!” He almost shouts it out and kicks the nearest chair furiously. Sherlock visibly recoils, his head lowered, hands clasped together in a defensive manner. He doesn’t look at John, he doesn’t look at Molly. But John doesn’t seem to notice, breathing heavily, barely controlling his anger. He says in a tight, angry whisper, “It’s not fair. Treating us like that. Concealing information. I get it, you have a habit of not telling me things. Fine. But think about Molly,” he points at her. “Now that Moriarty’s back, maybe she’s in danger now, having helped you to fake your death. _You_ put her in danger.”

“John, I said I’d take care of it,” Sherlock says quietly, too quietly, as if John is scratching a barely healed wound with a nail but he’s not going to protest, and not even let his pain show, persuaded that John has all the right to do it.

But John isn’t impressed with his strained calmness. “Just great! That’s the only answer we all seem to get nowadays.”

“Maybe I don’t mind the danger, for a change,” Molly says in a somewhat shaky voice, half-startled by John’s assumption, half-angry that John should speak to Sherlock like this. “Nothing happens to me, ever. So I’m fine with it.”

John turns to her and blinks, like he sees her properly for the first time. Probably he’s only thought of her as a damsel in distress, a victim, and not a person who could willingly rush into a perilous situation. People—men especially—make that mistake quite regularly, taking her shy and jittery demeanor into account, and not the fact that she slices cadavers for a living, in a lab coat often splattered with blood and with a bone saw in her hand. And the fact that she tends to fall for those who call themselves sociopaths.

“Molly,” John says in a softer but still irritated manner, “you might want to justify his behaviour, I get it, but his secretiveness does us all no good. And not for the first time.” He aims a pointed finger at Sherlock, punctuating his words. “Two years. Two years you let us grieve. Me, Mrs. Hudson. One word, Sherlock—it would have been enough. One word to let me know that you were alive. But nah, you don’t care. You rush off to hunt down Moriarty’s henchmen on your own. It’s more important than any of us. The game. It’s never over for you.”

“We seem to have had this conversation, John.” Sherlock’s voice sounds anguished and tired. “I said I’m sorry, so many times. And you said you’d forgiven me.”

“Forgiven you? What for?” Molly intervenes—and turns to John. “He told you _why_ he did it, right?”

John grimaces briefly. “Oh yes. Because Moriarty had to be stopped. Sherlock worried I might say something indiscreet. Let the cat out of the bag. You don’t want us to spoil the game this time either, do you, Sherlock?”

Molly walks closer to Mary and tells her quietly, “You might want to check on Mrs. Hudson. She’s in the kitchen downstairs.” It’s somehow inappropriate that Mary should sit in Sherlock’s armchair, like she belongs here, and listen to all of this, looking almost _amused_. 

It’s probably the expression on Molly’s face that makes Mary start off at once, without arguing.

John is not finished with his monologue, his anger still boiling. “I bet you had lots of fun, Sherlock, chasing Moriarty’s network!”

“Fun?” Molly can hardly believe her ears. “John, how can you say that? How _dare_ you? He gave up two years of his life, his reputation, his work to protect you and Mrs. Hudson and Greg. His brother might have taken care of the snipers aiming at you, sure, but there could be someone else to take their place—if Jim’s men knew that Sherlock was alive. He couldn’t tell you anything for your own safety, don’t you get it?”

John and Sherlock speak simultaneously. “What are you implying? What snipers?” John inquires, uncomprehending. “Molly, stop,” Sherlock warns her hoarsely.

But she can’t stop, not when she realizes that John doesn’t know anything. “The snipers that would have killed you unless Sherlock jumped. Two years, John. He lost two years, for your sake, and he couldn’t even contact you without putting you in danger. He was all alone. Do you know that he’s been wounded, badly, do you know that he’s been…”

“Molly, don’t,” Sherlock begs her.

“…tortured?” she finishes awkwardly.

For a moment, the silence is deafening. John rubs his forehead as if he wants to push the new data into his brain. “Is that true?”

Sherlock looks at him with weary eyes. “What does it matter? If you really need to know—yes, that’s what happened in Serbia. I got caught, quite foolishly, and for some time I wasn’t… fit for work. Now I can’t tell for certain if all of the Serbian branch is destroyed. Are you satisfied, knowing that? Or should I say sorry for this too, for having failed you? It’s my fault, I admit it. I shouldn’t have come back until I was convinced that you were safe, but I was so tempted to think it was over… Or maybe I should have jumped from that roof for real,” he adds with a short, bitter chuckle. “You’d have been so much happier if I did, and it would have been easier for me too. I’m not sure I can go through this over and over again. Dying for you.”

John sinks to the sofa. “Sherlock—” he says in a choked voice and touches Sherlock’s shoulder, hesitantly. A few moments later, they are enveloped in a tight hug, John muttering something apologetic and Sherlock letting him.

Seeing them like this, Molly feels a sudden stab of jealousy, uncontrolled and unwanted. This is how Sherlock must have felt helping John and Mary with their wedding, pushing them together, ensuring that they are both happy. Molly could never see what was so special about John, but Sherlock clearly does. She’s not going to question his choice of friends. Whatever he wants is fine, or so she keeps telling herself.

Later, when the histrionics have settled down and John is rattling dishes in the kitchen, Sherlock—wearing a red dressing gown over his clothes—starts sticking up maps, notes and paperwork onto the wall, balancing on his tiptoes on the sofa. He looks more like himself, absorbed in his work. Molly enjoys watching him.

“You didn’t have to protect me,” Sherlock says suddenly, without looking down at her, fiddling with some photos.

Molly shrugs, unflappably, though he can’t see it. “That’s what friends do. That’s what you do. Protect those you care about. I’m afraid it’s catching.”

Sherlock huffs, hiding a grin, and Molly can’t help a sad smile too. It’s kind of funny that except for the obvious difference in intellect, they are so much alike, doing everything they can for people who matter the most and not expecting anything in return. Maybe that’s just their type of relationships.


End file.
